Chris Stedman is Executive Director of the Yale Humanist Community, a former Harvard University chaplain and an alum of Interfaith Youth Core. He is the author of Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious.

Strange to call Jesus a moralist – to me he seems more of a mystic looking to transcend morals / rules / laws – comparable to Rumi.

I also wonder what sort of atheist Pullman is….was his idea of ‘dust’ a purely fictional idea, or does he really think that somehow some sort of conscious ‘stuff’ unites and directs us all – which would make him a Stoic pantheist. Stoics also believed we all have an inner daemon, by the by – eudaimonia means ‘having a kindly daemon’, a bit like Pantalaimon!

‘I like to say I’m a complete materialist but…matter is conscious. How do I know that? Because I’m matter and I’m conscious. What you often get in people of this stripe (and Brian Cox — the TV physicist — goes in for it as well), is a sentence of the formula “X is no more than/just/merely/nothing but Y.” For example: “The world is nothing but the action of molecules” or “Love is merely the movement of electrons in the brains.” Sentences of that sort are nearly always mistaken. I would prefer they were put in the form of “Love is a movement of electrons in the brain, among other things.”’